Fellow XOTcl community,
here comes the annoucemnt of XOTcl 0.9.
best regards -gustaf neumann .uwe zdun ==================================================================================
Announcing XOTcl 0.9 ********************
WHAT IS XOTCL?
XOTcl is an object-oriented extension of Tcl that was derived from OTcl. In short, XOTcl tries to provide a highly flexible, reflective, component-based, and object-oriented environment. It integrates language support for high level concepts which are not found in other languages, with reasonable performance. It prevails the Tcl programming style and the dynamic/introspective nature of the language, rather than introducing other language's styles and rigidness (such as C++) into Tcl.
RECENT CHANGES relative to 0.85 are:
- new functionality:
* Per object filters: in addition to traditional filters (which are called now "instfilters") one can define now filters per objects as well. XOTcl supports now the following interceptors: per class filters and mixins (called instfilters and instmixins), and per object filters and mixins (called filters and mixins).
* filterguards: This is a new mechanism to specify when filters should be applied (see tutorial and language reference).
* Namespace transparency for XOTcl procs and instprocs: In previous releases, the programmer was responsible to use :: prefixes in order to safely address Tcl commands from XOTcl (e.g. an instance of a class defining "set" had to use ::set). Now, the namespaces of Classes and objects are ignored for command resolutions avoiding potential interferences.
* Namespace on demand: XOTcl objects allocate namespaces on demand (e.g. when procs or child objects are defined).
* XOTcl is now a "well behaved" extension: When libxotcl is loaded everything resides in the ::xotcl namespace. Use "namespace import xotcl::*" to import the global commands (xotclsh and xowish do this per default).
* Improved parameter settings (see tutorial)
- Speed improvements: * Significant speedup through the more consequent use of Tcl_Objs for accessing classes and objects.
* Methods for append/lappend/array etc. are about 3 times faster through the use of insttclcmd (see below)
* Parameter methods: Methods for accessing parameters are now 4 to 5 times faster. In the following example, "name" and "age" are parameters: Class Person -parameter {{age 0} name} Person p1 -age 99 -name gustaf puts [p1 age] setting and retrieving of parameters has now roughly the same speed as the set methods
- Reduced memory consumption for objects and classes:
The size of XOTclObject structure went from 172 bytes to 48 bytes by
* allocating assertion structures and namespaces on demand, and * by and by omitting in the default setup metadata
10 thousand XOTcl objects consume now on a 32bit machine about 2 MB of memory in total (including whatever Tcl needs for commands etc)
- new Class methods * instparametercmd: define a new getter/setter for instance variables for instances of used class * insttclcmd: evaluate an Tcl command in the context of an object
- new Object methods: * parametercmd: define a new getter/setter for instance variables for an object * configure: method to call a series of methods on an object e.g. Object o1 o1 configure -set x 1 -set y 2
- new subcommands for info method: * info methods: returns procs, commands and mixins, accepts modifiers: -noprocs, -nocmds, -nomixins * info instfilters * info filter accepts new modifiers: -guards, -order
- fixes: * propagation of return codes (e.g. ... return -code continue ...) which is needed for Tk event maps
* various actiweb fixes (agent migration was broken)
* improved documentation
- Support for AOLserver:
XOTcl is now prepared for use in the AOL-server. The stubs for AOL-server are integrated in XOTcl (many thanks to Zoran Vasiljevic). The required patch for the AOL-Server is available from http://media.wu-wien.ac.at/download.html#aol
- Stub-library support:
XOTcl supports now the stub library. This means that it is less dependent on particular Tcl implementations. The support was quite tricky since some commands used by XOTcl (like Tcl_IncrObjCmd, Tcl_UpvarObjCmd, ...) are not exported by the stub library, and the solution has to work in the multithreaded AOL-server environment)
- potential incompatibilities: * "[self] next" is gone, use "next" instead. * The access of instance variables through the tcl-set command is deprecated and works only when the namespace is created. Instead of Object o set o::x 1 use Object o o set x 1 * procsearch returns a different format (see Changelog)
MORE INFO General and more detailed information about XOTcl and its components can be found at http://www.xotcl.org
Best regards,
Gustaf Neumann Uwe Zdun